Can Trump Really Just Eliminate The Department Of Education?

Trump's strategy for dismantling the DoE is coming into focus, and Democrats are fighting back

U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order to reduce the size and scope of the Education Department alongside school children. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

On March 20, Donald Trump signed an executive order to begin dismantling the federal Department of Education.

Or as the Trump White House’s Orwellian press release puts it:

President Donald J. Trump Empowers Parents, States, and Communities to Improve Education Outcomes

Yes, this EO is being framed by the administration as one of Trump’s famous “sending it back to the states” issues, even though, as we know, such a federalist approach only appeals to Trump when it suits him politically (see also how Trump spun the overturning of Roe v Wade during last year’s election.)

Trump is perfectly happy to wield presidential power over everything from voting rights to women’s sports. In Trump’s mind, the states—not to mention parents—are not to be trusted on those issues.

But in the case of education, according to the text of Trump’s EO,

The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities...

The signing ceremony itself had—perhaps appropriately—dystopian undertones, using children as props to cosplay as mini-presidents as they mock-signed their own EOs at their own desks. This implied that kids themselves are somehow down with the shuttering of the Department, as if singing in unison, “we don’t need no education.”

Of course, the ceremony’s Pink Floyd vibes were rather ironic, considering Another Brick in the Wall concerns a revolt against a totalitarian regime, while Trump seeks to solidify his.

To put a fine point on the performative nature of the whole spectacle, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the order merely directed McMahon "to greatly minimize the agency” but that “when it comes to student loans and Pell grants, those will still be run out of the Department of Education."

So what does Trump’s executive order actually mean for the Department of Education and how does he intend to get around the constitutional requirement that only Congress can eliminate a federal agency? I’ll answer these questions and take a look at how Democrats are fighting back against Trump’s latest radical play to remake the federal government in Project 2025’s image.

A Right-Wing Fever Dream Decades In The Making

The Department of Education was established as a cabinet-level agency in 1979 by Congress, which at the time had Democratic majorities in both chambers as well as Jimmy Carter in the White House. Up until then, the closest there had been to an education department was the Eisenhower-created Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

As currently constituted, the Department of Education is one of the smallest federal cabinet-level agencies, with its 2024 appropriation of $268 billion representing just 4% of the entire federal budget.

As for what the DoE actually does, the work breaks down into three basic buckets: student loans, funding for low-income students and those with disabilities, and enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. According to NBC News:

Among its most prominent duties, the agency manages the $1.6 trillion federal student loan portfolio for college and postsecondary students. It also distributes billions of dollars in funding for K-12 schools through programs that serve more than 50 million students in nearly 100,000 public schools and 32,000 private schools.

That funding includes more than $15 billion for thousands of so-called Title I schools — schools that receive federal dollars to help low-income families. And it includes more than $15 billion in funding for programs — under the auspices of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which provides grants to states for the education of children with disabilities — that ensure disabled students have access to a free and appropriate public education.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights enforces laws aiming to prevent discrimination in schools, and the agency’s Institute of Education Sciences runs data collection, statistics and research monitoring student outcomes.

As Forbes breaks it down:

• $18.8 billion in Title I funding for high-poverty schools, serving approximately 26 million students

• $15.5 billion in IDEA funding, supporting 7.3 million students with disabilities

• $120.8 billion in Federal Student Aid programs, helping 10.8 million college students

While it’s common to assume that the federal government provides most of the cash for schools and decides all of the curricula, the reality is quite different. States and local districts disburse the vast bulk of public education funding, with just 14% of public school budgets around the country funded by the federal government. Notably, as the agency itself acknowledges, the U.S. DoE has no role in developing curricula, setting requirements for enrollment or graduation, or determining state education standards.

Even so, the far right has been trying to shutter it for decades, beginning with Ronald Reagan who ran for president in 1980 on a pledge to eliminate the agency. And while Reagan ultimately conceded defeat on that goal, The Heritage Foundation was only getting started.

In 1981, Heritage issued what it then called the “Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration,” which listed among its education goals:

Abolishing the Department of Education and “reducing [its] controls over American education.”

43 years later, Heritage would drop yet another “Mandate For Leadership,” its deservedly maligned Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project, which once again recommended the elimination of the Department of Education.

And while Trump was quick to distance himself from that conservative blueprint on the campaign trail, it will come as little surprise that Trump’s plans for the DoE closely mirror the goals of Project 2025.

In its prescient analysis from last summer, the Brookings Institution called Project 2025’s education agenda “a drastic overhaul of federal education policy” and laid out Heritage’s policy goals as follows:

- Dismantle the U.S. Department of Education (ED)

- Eliminate the Head Start program for young children in poverty

- Discontinue the Title I program that provides federal funding to schools serving low-income children

- Rescind federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students

- Undercut federal capacity to enforce civil rights law

- Reduce federal funding for students with disabilities and remove guardrails designed to ensure these children are adequately served by schools

- Promote universal private school choice

- Privatize the federal student loan portfolio

And while even Project 2025 acknowledges it would require an act of Congress to actually eliminate the agency, per Brookings there would be plenty a Trump administration would be able to do with executive actions alone, including:

- Roll back civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students

- Roll back Title IX protections against sex-based discrimination

- Dismantle the federal civil rights enforcement apparatus

- Eliminate current income-driven repayment plans and require higher monthly payments for low-income borrowers

- Remove protections from predatory colleges that leave students with excessive debt

One need only look at the White House’s stated goals of its March 20 executive order, as well as Trump’s Day One rescission of Biden-era “orders that had called for nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ young people in school,” and his March 10 order limiting eligibility for a popular student loan forgiveness to see how he is checking off items on the Project 2025 wishlist.

Since Trump’s March 20 signing ceremony, the Project 2025 Tracker is now up to 42% complete.

How Would Trump Actually Shut Down The Department of Education?

During the signing ceremony last week, Trump talked a big game, as he often does, saying “We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible.” Despite this, even he had to concede two political realities:

1. the overwhelming popularity of certain DoE functions:

At the signing, Trump said federal Pell grants (a common type of federal undergraduate financial aid), Title I funding and resources and funding for children with disabilities would be “preserved in full and redistributed to various other agencies and departments”; and

2. the reality that an act of Congress would be needed to put the final nail in the coffin of the agency:

“I hope they’re going to be voting for it," Trump said of congressional Democrats, "because ultimately it may come before them.”

This requirement is even laid out in Article I of the Constitution, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from cutting the agency’s legs out from under it, even before its March 20th EO.

Per The New York Times:

Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, his administration has slashed the department’s work force by more than half and eliminated $600 million in grants. The job cuts hit particularly hard at the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which enforces the country’s guarantee that all students have an equal opportunity to an education.

This includes the administration’s cutting of more than half the agency’s 4,100 employees including the March 11 announced layoffs of 1,315 DoE employees, as well as 572 employees who accepted separation packages and 63 probationary workers who were terminated in February.

Even as Trump reduces the DoE’s workforce, his EO seeks to both dismantle the agency and continue the services people rely on by transferring responsibilities to other federal agencies.

Per Forbes:

The executive order outlines specific transitions for key education functions:

• Civil rights enforcement will move to the Justice Department

• Federal student loan programs will shift to the Treasury

• Special education oversight will transition to Health and Human Services

And as The New York Times notes:

The day after the order, Mr. Trump announced that the Small Business Administration would assume control of the government’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio, and that the Health and Human Services Department would oversee nutrition programs and special education services.

This is a slow death by a thousand executive orders.

On a parallel track with this, per NBC News, “Republicans in the House have introduced various plans that seek to eliminate the department.”

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, is the latest to pledge to introduce legislation to fulfill this right-wing fever dream:

“I agree with President Trump that the Department of Education has failed its mission,” Mr. Cassidy said in a statement. “Since the department can only be shut down with congressional approval, I will support the president’s goals by submitting legislation to accomplish this as soon as possible.”

It’s unclear, however, how Trump expects this to clear Congress. First of all, back in 2023, a measure to eliminate the agency garnered the support of just ¾ of House Republicans. But even if Trump and Johnson could muster every Republican in the House to support such legislation, passage in the Senate, where Republicans would need 7 Democrats to bring it to the floor, is an uphill climb for Trump to say the least.

A recent poll found that 60% of Americans oppose eliminating the Department, with just 33% in favor, making it a risky move politically to support.

That’s why it’s clear that Trump’s pre-emptive downsizing of the agency, a process which so far has been able to bypass Congress, IS the strategy.

As The Hill notes:

Trump allies are urging the department to become as small as it can and to move Congress-mandated programs to other federal agencies.

Democratic-aligned supporters of the agency, however, are not letting it go down without a fight.

The Battle To Save The Department Of Education

In the wake of the March 20 executive order to begin to dismantle the agency, education advocates filed multiple lawsuits.

The first, brought by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and two public school districts in Massachusetts, argues:

“...the Department of Education is created by statute and cannot be abolished, dismantled, or closed by the President or Secretary,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint. “That is equally true whether this closure is accomplished by an Executive Order, by mass firings of the Department’s employees (without staff, there is no Department; just a building), by transferring Department functions to other agencies, or by any other means.”

And that

the Trump administration’s moves since it came to power in January, including an effort to roughly halve the department’s work force, “will interfere with the department’s ability to carry out its statutorily required functions.”

AAUP President Todd Wolfson laid out the stakes of the actions Trump is taking:

“Funding for college education will be stripped away, programs for students with disabilities and students living in poverty will be eviscerated, and enforcement of civil rights laws against race- or sex-based discrimination in higher education will disappear.”

The second suit, brought in Maryland by the NAACP and the National Education Association union (NEA), argues that the Trump administration has sought “a de facto dismantling of the department by executive fiat.”

“Donald Trump’s own secretary of education has acknowledged they can’t legally shut down the Department of Education without Congress,” said Aaron Ament, president of the National Student Legal Defense Network, which is helping represent the National Education Association in the case.

“Yet that is, for all intents and purposes, exactly what they are doing,” he added. “It’s a brazen violation of the law that will upend the lives of countless students and families.”

Their suit seeks to prohibit the Education Department and Ms. McMahon “from continuing their dismantling of the department and implementing the March 20 executive order.” Both suits seek to reinstate the thousands of DoE employees fired in the administration’s mass layoffs.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement that any legislative attempt to eliminate the Department would be blocked in the Senate.

"Let me be very clear: If Republicans ever, ever, try to move a bill through the Senate that shuts down the Department of Education, Senate Democrats will halt it in its tracks. It will go nowhere. It will be dead on arrival.”

Senate Democrats are seeking an investigation into the gutting of the DoE, calling it “illegal” and saying it “threatens to hurt the very groups that the Department is purportedly aiming to serve.”

“The roughly 1,300 layoffs disproportionately target employees who served on teams that facilitate financial aid for tens of millions of families, enforce our civil rights laws, and ensure that every student has a place to learn in our K-12 public schools,”

House Democrats are fighting back as well. In a letter to Education Department head Linda McMahon, Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), ranking member of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, and Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-VA), ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, fired back at the administration’s executive order and the mass layoffs of “illegally dismissed employees” as attempts to “usurp Congress’s authority.”

It is Congress—not the President, his Administration, or any of his associates—who has the authority to close the Department. This Executive Order and the ongoing staff reductions are designed to effectively shutter the Department, and they usurp Congress’s authority. They are also counter to the will of the American people, the majority of whom oppose efforts to close the Department.

Scott is also looking to open an inquiry into the administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency without input from Congress. Additionally, New Jersey’s Democratic House delegation is calling for the EO to be reversed.

While litigating Trump’s EO in the courts and attempting to re-assert Congressional power when it comes to the DoE are ongoing, there is an increasing sense that this battle is largely going to play out in the states.

Democrats around the country are pushing back against Trump’s moves, including Texas State Rep. Greg Casar:

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk are stealing from America's children in order to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.”

“Elon Musk and Trump want to dismantle and destroy the Department of Education and then take that money and give it out to themselves and to billionaires in the form of government contracts and tax breaks.”

And after Virginia’s Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin pronounced Virginia “ready to take full responsibility for K-12 education,” state Democrats fired back:

“When we think of Trump’s push to dismantle the Department of Education, we think of George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door, blocking Black students from entering. It brings back memories of Virginia engaging in massive resistance,” read a statement by Virginia Senate Democrats. “This effort to push education back to the states is designed to roll back all efforts at progress since the 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision.

“Trump and his minions clearly want to limit educational opportunities. When will the madness end?”

In Connecticut, Democratic lawmakers are exploring alternate means of funding school lunches in case that funding is slashed, as well as ways to boost funding for students with disabilities.

As Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee President Heather Williams said in a statement after Trump’s DoE order:

“Now more than ever, Democratic leadership in state legislatures is the last line of defense.”

To that end, as Iowa House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst made clear, that effort is two-fold: first to “make the funding cuts real for voters” and second to bring red-state Republican allies into the fold:

“We know the environment that we’re living in right now, but I have had conversations with folks who are saying, ‘Whoa, we got to slow down. Like this is a lot, and we need to know what the impact will be,’” Konfrst said. “There are legislative Republicans who care a lot about public education and now is the time for them to speak up because I think they know that their party is going too far here.”

Even the conservative American Enterprise Institute is skeptical of Trump’s overreach here.

“There are good reasons to streamline operations at the Department and even to shut it down entirely. But efforts to date have been too hasty,” Beth Akers, senior fellow with right-wing American Enterprise Institute, said in a statement. “The cuts we’ve already seen will likely be disruptive in ways that weren’t expected.”

Not only do a majority of Americans oppose the Trump administration’s actions to dismantle the Department of Education, a Morning Consult poll last month found that a majority of Americans want to actually “preserve or expand” its funding.

Turns out, Trump’s attempt to dismantle the DoE is not just bad policy, it’s bad politics. Democrats are on the clear winning side of this issue and should fight this like the nation’s future depends on it. Because it does.